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In international research, the term prose poem generally describes a particular genre, created by Louis Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. But the term, as well as the conceptual opposition between prose and poetry that it refers to, became central to the aesthetic debate already at the end of the 17th century.

This thesis, the subject of which is the European prose poem in connection with literary modernity, therefore starts with a description of the basic problem surrounding the concept and the practice of prose poetry. The basic argument is that prose, which appears as a discoursive practice within the medium of writing, introduces a neutrality which makes it conceivable as Language as such rather than as one discoursive practice among others. This causes a crisis of legitimacy for poetry, which continues to use verse forms taken from an oral tradition. Poetry becomes ”versified prose”, a subordinated categorization which literary modernity sets out to challenge. The primary project ofliterary modernity from the 17th century onwards has been to ”save” poetry from the discoursive hegemony of prose by developing a new, more autonomous poetic principle. Romanticism was a first effort at this, but it was modernism that, at least to some extent, finally accomplished it.

The first and second chapters ofthe thesis are devoted to 17th and 18th century prose poems. The succeeding three chapters describe and analyse the modern prose poem(s), and discuss the aesthetics of modernism. The chapters centre on the prose poems of Louis Bertrand, Chales Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Chapters six to eleven deal with the prose poem in Scandinavian literature between 1880 and 1910. They focus mainly on the Dane Johannes Jorgensen, the Norwegian Sigbjern Obstfelder, and the Swede Vilhelm Ekelund. Prose poems by other poets, such as August Strindberg, Ola Hansson, Johannes V. Jensen, Hjalmar Söderberg, Gustaf Uddgren, and Ivar Conradson. are also analysed and discussed. The purpose of these studies is to show in what different ways the prose poem was used, and how important it was for the emergence of modernism.